Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  “So I did. Well, was there anything else about him, more than being unpleasant to his graduate students, which you can tell us about? Something, I don’t know—bigger?”

  Jamie shrugged his shoulders and looked stumped.

  Tom tried again. “In Blaine’s wallet it says in case of accident notify somebody in Virginia. Obviously he wasn’t married. Didn’t he like women?”

  Jamie smirked. “I’d say he liked them too well to settle down to one.”

  Holder’s eyebrows went up. “O.K., if he had more than one, how many and who were they?”

  “Oh! Well!” The smirk vanished. “I don’t mean to give you the wrong impression. I don’t really know anything about his private life—well, I guess it’s just a matter of a general impression, you understand? Mason acts like a ladies’ man, so everyone assumes he is one. You know how it is.”

  Holder knew how it was, all right. Jamie Newman had assumed, quite suddenly, the elaborate nonchalance of the incompetent liar. Tom went after him, politely (at least at first) but thoroughly. Surely he must have heard something said? Even casually? Something, perhaps, he didn’t believe? Didn’t students always make jokes about their teachers? Had jokes, comments, wisecracks, been made about Blaine’s, uh, appreciation of women? Couldn’t Jamie remember any of these comments or wisecracks?

  He couldn’t. He was awfully sorry, but he couldn’t. They had all been so general, so patently absurd. “You know, things like, Mason bought a raffle ticket and won a date with Angelina Jolie, but he wasn’t interested because she was too old for him. Things like that, just silly jokes. There was never any real content to them.”

  Tom Holder was stymied. He was used to witnesses who lied stupidly, who could be tripped up by cross-questioning. But this young man, though he lied badly—that is, you could tell he was lying—did not lie stupidly. He talked a lot and said nothing, so you couldn’t challenge him. And he was quick, quick enough to make up something to say that sounded real, like that Angelina Jolie bit. If it hadn’t been for that breezy manner, he would have been very convincing.

  It might not be important, this thing Jamie Newman didn’t want to tell the police, it might be only that he wasn’t sure about it and didn’t want to repeat gossip, it might not be anything guilty, exactly…but then again it might. What if, for instance, Jamie didn’t want to say anything about what women Blaine had been fooling around with because one of them had been his own wife?

  But as soon as Holder had the thought, he canceled it. No, Mrs. Newman was not the type of woman that men fooled around with. A plain, skinny little thing, with short black hair and scared eyes and a funny mouth. Holder had been surprised to find that her husband was so remarkably good-looking. Yes, an attractive fellow, no doubt, but what was he hiding?

  When Tom’s cell phone rang, it didn’t seem to him that anything productive had been interrupted. It was Flannery.

  “Sir? Colczhic just called in. They found the briefcase.”

  “Where?”

  “Patterson Road, about twenty yards west of Blaine’s house. On the path on the north side of the street.”

  “Tell Colczhic I’m on my way. And tell him I said good job.”

  Tom extricated himself from Jamie’s hospitality (Didn’t they want more coffee?) as rapidly as civility would allow, and went down the stairs with Sergeant Pursley eager in his wake.

  As Pursley drove his superior to Patterson Road, he had a question. “Uh, Chief? How did you know where to look for that briefcase?”

  The temptation to appear omniscient was strong, but Tom Holder was a modest man and honest to boot. “I didn’t know for sure. But Blaine had it when he left the library, and it wasn’t with the body at the church, so I figured he dropped it when he got whacked as he was walking home.”

  “Oh!” Pursley digested this statement, knowing he was being honored with the Chief’s confidence. “You think he got whacked walking home and the body was taken to the church?”

  “Yep.”

  “But why couldn’t Blaine have walked over to the church, or driven his car, or gone in somebody else’s car, and then been killed over there right where we found him?”

  The car rolled to a halt at the traffic light by the First Presbyterian Church, and Holder restrained himself from telling Pursley to run it. After all, the briefcase wasn’t going anywhere. But he was excited. “Well, if you promise not to tell anyone, Purze, I’ll let you in on it. It’s not my brilliant powers of deduction. I just got a feeling, a strong feeling.”

  “You mean a hunch?”

  Holder meant a conviction, but he knew Pursley wouldn’t grasp the distinction. “Yeah, call it a hunch. I just looked at that body and knew that the guy hadn’t been killed there, he’d been put there after he was dead. Fifty bucks says the Trenton guys will bear me out once they check over the ground.”

  The car moved again. “Then what made you think he was killed walking home? I mean, just because he wasn’t killed at the church.”

  “Just because it’s simple. If he was taken to the church after he was dead, you’re right, it could have happened several ways. He might have been riding in a car when he was killed. He might have been in his house. Or in somebody else’s house. Or anywhere. Or he might have been walking home and somebody was lying in wait for him. I decided to try that one first, because from the standpoint of the killer it’s the easiest. You don’t have to persuade Blaine to get in your car or let you in the house or anything like that. You just hide behind a bush with a baseball bat and wait for him. So I tried the simple theory and I got lucky. Let’s just hope my luck holds.”

  A knot of dark figures stood on the north side of Patterson Road; there were flickers of flashlights among them. Pursley pulled the car up a few feet away, one of the figures hurried forward and became recognizably Colczhic, and Chief Holder was hustled over to look at the prize. This he did from a cautious seven feet, raking the ground with the flashlight he had plucked from the deferential hand of one of Colczhic’s underlings. “Have you disturbed the ground around it?”

  “No, sir, we spotted it from about ten feet off and none of us have come any closer than we are now.”

  “O.K.,” said Tom, “the chances of anybody else having dropped this briefcase here are about eight million to one, but I’d give a month’s salary to be able to prove this is Mason Blaine’s before we call Crime Scene.”

  “If you’ll come around here, sir?” Colczhic led his superior by a rather circuitous route to a spot on the opposite side of the path. “You have to get down pretty low, sir,” he apologized, telescoping into an easy squat that Holder’s middle-aged knees duplicated with more difficulty.

  The beam of Colczhic’s flashlight insinuated itself between the ground and the top of the briefcase, where the leather curved up toward the clasp. About three inches of the underside of the case was visible in the tiny wedge of light. “E.V.M.B.,” Holder pronounced, with immense satisfaction. “Beers all around. Now rope it off.”

  At this point there was nothing left for the Harton crew to do but wait until the crime scene team arrived from Trenton. Tom left Pursley in charge of the Patterson Road site. He himself returned to the driveway of St. Margaret’s Church, where he again gazed down upon the body of Mason Blaine and became, if anything, more convinced that the man had not met his end in the place where he was lying. And it wasn’t just because they’d found his briefcase over on Patterson Road. The briefcase was merely corroboration. Tom had been certain before that. Dead certain, he said to himself grimly.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kathryn emerged from fathoms deep, cursed her ringing alarm clock, and repeatedly whacked the snooze bar. Finally she dragged herself out of bed, assembled herself in record time, threw herself down the stairs, and plumped herself down at the breakfast table just in time to avoid the gentle recriminations of Mrs. Warburton. Tea, orange juice, toast, and one egg over easy magically appeared. Mrs. Warburton sat down opposite Kathryn with a bowl of oatmeal and a
face full of curiosity, and Kathryn did her best to fill her in on the previous night’s adventure between bites, but there wasn’t much time. It was one of the mornings Kathryn was scheduled to assist Father Mark at the 8:00 A.M. Eucharist at St. Margaret’s before going off to the Seminary to teach her classes.

  Kathryn lived only three blocks from the church and they were pretty magnificent blocks. The pre-Revolutionary houses were the element that impressed most people, but Kathryn was more impressed by the maple trees, which at the moment were decked in their gaudiest autumnal finery. It was one of those diamond-bright days when the air is clear and sharp as a knife. Kathryn hugged her coat around her and felt intensely thankful to be alive, and began to talk to God quite specifically about it.

  As she neared the church, however, two things intruded upon her happy thoughts. First she became aware, from some distance, that the church grounds—the entire church grounds—were marked off by yellow police crime scene tapes. Next, as she got closer, she saw the Rector and Tom Holder and heard their familiar voices in unfamiliar heat. The Rector’s voice, in fact, was rapidly rising in volume.

  Tom was on the inside of the tape. Father Mark was on the outside, tall, handsome, silver-haired, and incandescent with fury.

  Kathryn had never seen him more than mildly cross, and she was shocked. It was like looking at a stranger.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he was shouting at Tom.

  She couldn’t hear Tom’s reply because it wasn’t as loud as the Rector’s; it was clear Tom still had some slim hold on his temper, but it was also clear that the hold was tenuous and loosening fast. Tom was gesturing, obviously explaining that the people crawling all over the place on their hands and knees were completely necessary and so were the yellow tapes.

  It did him no good.

  “It’s a sacrilege!” yelled the Rector. “Do you realize my congregation is arriving for Eucharist any minute now? How are they even supposed to get in?”

  Kathryn was now close enough to hear Tom reply, “We’ll station a man at the Stocker Street end of the driveway to tell people to come around to the Merton Street side. And we’ll have a man at the gate there”—he gestured again—“to lift the tape so people can get in.”

  Father Mark fumed in silence for about three seconds, then pronounced, imperiously, “All right. But I want all of this crap off the premises, and all of these people, by noon, do you hear me?”

  “Where the hell do you get off telling me how to do my effing job?” Tom yelled full in Father Mark’s face, while turning an unaccustomed shade of purple. Every single member of the Harton police force, not one of whom had ever heard the Chief raise his voice in anger, stood with mouth wide open. The crime scene team from Trenton all stopped what they were doing as if prepared for a brief sideshow. Kathryn had arrived at the curb across the street from them, close enough to be heard without shouting.

  “Tom! Mark!” she cried in a voice like cold water.

  Both men whirled to face her. To their credit, both looked embarrassed.

  “Tom,” she said levelly, striding across the street, “I suggest you return to your work. Mark, you and I have a Eucharist to celebrate.”

  Tom jerked his head in a nod, turned on his heel, and went to speak to one of the Trenton team.

  Kathryn took the Rector by the elbow and forcibly wheeled him to face the gate Tom had indicated. As she marched him up the sidewalk she scolded under her breath, “Mark, for God’s sake, what’s got into you? If it’s a sacrilege, it’s not Tom who committed it, it’s whoever murdered Mason Blaine. Tom and his gang are just trying to clean it up. And you can’t tell the police to vacate a crime scene because you don’t like them cluttering up your pretty little garden!”

  “Kathryn,” the Rector replied frostily, “we are not talking about a pretty little garden, we are talking about a church.”

  “It wouldn’t make a particle of difference,” Kathryn replied, undaunted by the Rector’s hauteur, “if it were the Holy Sepulchre. It’s a crime scene. It’s going to get treated like one. Don’t you want this guy caught, the guy who parked a corpse in our driveway here?”

  Father Mark was unlocking the side door to the church. “Of course I do.”

  “And do you really want one of your parishioners strolling onto the church grounds and accidentally tripping over and destroying forever the only clue that might have caught him?”

  Father Mark had arrived at the vestry door and was unlocking it. He sighed. “Why did I ever invite you to be on the staff of this church?” he wondered aloud. “You can be so intensely annoying.”

  “I can, can’t I?” Kathryn agreed placidly. “By the way,” she added, slipping off her coat and reaching for her vestments, “you haven’t forgotten we’ve got an appointment this afternoon at four, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t. What are we talking about?”

  “Surprise,” said Kathryn, offering further proof of how annoying she could be.

  Outside, Chief Holder was listening to one of the crime scene team, who also happened to be one of his poker-playing buddies.

  “Not a hope in hell of getting tracks from the tires,” Sid was telling him. “The grass is too thick and healthy, as you can see for yourself. You got a pretty place here, you keep it nice. Not like some of the churchyards we see in Trenton.”

  “Yeah,” Tom acknowledged. “It helps to have a lot of millionaires in the congregation to pay the gardeners. Anyway, you’re telling me somebody drove off the driveway here, and back on here, right around the place where Blaine’s body was lying?”

  “Yep.”

  “Make my day and tell me you can prove they did it last night while the body was lying here.”

  “No can do.”

  “Didn’t think so, just thought I’d ask. O.K., I’m gonna leave you guys here to get on with it while I get over to the university to talk to people who knew Blaine. If the Rector comes back out and gives you any grief, this is what you do: You talk to him politely, you call him ‘Father Randall,’ and you make it very clear to him that he owns the inside of the church building but we own the grounds. Until further notice. Period.”

  “The only thing that’s gonna be hard about that is the polite bit. And you weren’t so polite yourself, there, a minute ago.”

  “Well, try to make up for me.”

  “’Morning, Tom,” a voice sang out behind Tom’s back.

  “Aw, shit!” Tom muttered under his breath. Sid Garvey tried, not very successfully, to hide a grin. Tom turned. “’Morning, Nick.”

  Nick Silverman was the District Attorney.

  “How’s it going, Tom?”

  “Well, we’ve established that the victim was killed as he walked home last night from a class he taught at the University library, then his body was moved to here, obviously in a car, though why it was moved we don’t know yet. I’m on my way over to the Spanish Department now to talk to the faculty and then to the graduate students he supervised. I’ve talked to one of those students already, and it seems Blaine was a womanizer, so I’m hoping it’s going to turn out to be a woman, you know what I mean, a man behind a woman. That kind of thing usually comes to light pretty fast because everybody knows about it.”

  “Good. Good. Well, you know I’m always here to help.”

  “Sure.”

  “And Tom—”

  “Yeah?”

  “This one has to get cleared up pretty fast. You know why, don’t you?”

  “Because every newspaper in the state is going to be barking up my ass about it because the victim was the chairman of one of the departments at the University.”

  “That’s one reason. Haven’t you noticed the other one?”

  “The other one?”

  “Tom. That’s where your body was dumped, right?” The D.A. pointed to the spot on the asphalt where Mason Blaine had been sprawled. “Now take a tiny little walk with me.” He took Tom’s elbow; when they got to the end of the church driv
eway, Silverman pointed to the left, past Augustine Institute, to a huge yellow house, pale in the morning sunshine. It was the Governor’s Mansion. Tom swore.

  “Exactly,” said the District Attorney.

  CHAPTER 5

  The morning sun picked out the gold lettering on the spine of Professor MacDonald’s favorite Cervantes, but he did not notice. He politely thanked the person at the other end of the line, hung up the phone, and stood staring at one of his book-lined walls. He could state, to a volume, how many books there were on those shelves, and he had read every one of them. Any number of them he had taught, and three of them he had written (in addition to some forty-seven articles in sundry learned journals). It was a life’s work, a professional passion of thirty-two years, lined up in inventoried rows on three walls of shelves. Ordinarily he derived great pleasure from the sight of those shelves; it was an indulgence he granted himself, to let his eyes wander over his books, while satisfaction welled up inside him like cool wine. But as he stood, his hand still resting on the telephone, it was not satisfaction that showed in his eyes, and for the first time since they had moved into the house, he stood in his study without seeing the books.

  After a few minutes he went down the hall to the living room. The living room was large but cozy, furnished in traditional style and in shades of burgundy and hunter green. In a chair at the far end, close to the French doors giving out onto the patio, sat a comfortable-looking lady in a fluffy pink housecoat. She was knitting.

  “Henry,” said her husband.

  “Yes, dear?” She looked up, but her hands continued to make unerring patterns with needles and yarn.

  “Henrietta, the most—” He broke off, and made an inconclusive gesture with his hand.

  The needles stopped. “John?” She laid aside the knitting. “Come sit down, John.” He started toward her, then stopped. She repeated, quietly, “Come sit down, John.”